Outside In | What Donald Trump should know about the global trade in human hair

The story of the hair trade is one of women in developing countries cutting, collecting and untangling hair to make a living. But it is also a story about billions of dollars in global trade

Reading Time:4 minutes

Workers clean hair for export in Yangon, Myanmar, in June 2018. Photo: Reuters

Published: 12:30am, 9 Mar 2019Updated: 1:42am, 9 Mar 2019

Recent heart-rending BBC reports of young – and not so young – Venezuelan women selling their hair to keep starvation at bay as they trekked overland towards Colombia and the United States border reminded me of one of the world’s least understood export industries, the global trade in human hair.

A week in meetings in Atlanta last week also brought me face to face with the other end of the business, where thousands of young black women have turned hair braiding into an awesome art.

As Emma Tarlo, anthropology professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, drily notes in her monumental Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair, “natural hair is not as simple as it first appears, for since time immemorial people have been arranging their hair in more or less spectacular ways which have often involved the addition of extra fibre, whether animal, vegetable, mineral or human”.

At the outset, she complains that the global human hair trade is “a backstage business about which little is known to those outside the trade”. And after several years of combing the world to research her tome, the numbers she garners still seem very shaky.

The trade in human hair – yes, there really is a customs classification for wigs, beards and brows – may amount to around US$2.5 billion, and beyond this, the hair extension industry in hairdressing salons from London to Harlem to Lagos probably adds several billion more.

But getting more accurate numbers seems a forlorn task, unaided by any official trade data.

.css-1m2rp1p{color:#34b8b5;}Outside In | What Donald Trump should know about the global trade in human hair

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;}The story of the hair trade is one of women in developing countries cutting, collecting and untangling hair to make a living. But it is also a story about billions of dollars in global trade

Outside In | What Donald Trump should know about the global trade in human hair

The story of the hair trade is one of women in developing countries cutting, collecting and untangling hair to make a living. But it is also a story about billions of dollars in global trade